This morning is the day. After 6 years with the company, Tom has decided it was time to move and is putting in his notice. He is nervous and excited. Tom meets with his direct manager and lets him know. Because of their one on ones Tom’s manager is not surprised and saw it coming.

Later, Tom is in the teams weekly update meeting and breaks the news. It is a rough moment because he has spent the last 6 years with this team and now he was leaving. In that moment, everything is now different.

Jen has worked with Tom for many years. They have become friends and colleagues. She is understanding of why Tom has decided to leave and is supportive. She knows that they will stay in contact long after Tom has left the company.

Hugo is the VP of Development and has been with the company since forever. Hugo is extremely upset. He views Tom’s choice as an insult to him and the company. How could someone just leave? Hugo will make it known of his anger to Tom, typically by being passive aggressive. Making comments about loyalty and trust.

Adrian is the Project manager. She is scared. Tom was a big part of the team and with him gone, she is unsure on how they are going to fill in the gaps.

John, another developer on the team, is sad. Tom was a mentor to him and now that he leaving, it’s like a peice of John is now missing. John is visibly upset over the news and anytime the topic of Tom leaving comes up, the emotions return.

Taylor, a mid level developer, is excited. With Tom leaving, this means there is a chance to step up and get noticed. She is pretty much pushing Tom out the door so she can start taking on more responsibility and start showing her worth.

When a person puts in their notice, everyone affected has one or more of the above reactions to some degree. In my experience, the majority of people will be like Jen. They will be understanding and supportive, maybe a tiny bit sad. They understand that the action of the person leaving is not directed at them nor some insult. The unexpected outliers that have a more extreme reaction are the ones to look out for as these are the people that make leaving a company harder than it should.

The bright side of it all is that these feelings will pass. Adrian will see that people like Taylor step up and fill the gaps. John will realise that Tom was a great mentor and has prepared him well. Even Hugo will get over it as anger is sometimes just a defence mechanism.

When you put in your notice, be ready for the sudden and abrupt change in how your soon to be ex-co workers interact with you. As you tie up loose ends, you will slowly fade to the background. Don’t fret though, you are about to start something new.

Ampersand is a newish client JavaScript framework that helps build native web applications. It is built and maintained by &yet. Ampersand is different than other frameworks because it is not a monolithic library that solves all your problems. It is a collections of small modules that all solve a single problem that when put together make up Ampersand. This allows you to easily switch out modules that don’t work for you. To read more about Ampersand and its benefits check out the following links.

Introducing Ampersand – Intro to Ampersand. Explains why &yet created and what they were hoping to achieve.

Human JavaScript – Book written about team based client side development with insights to what Ampersand gives you. READ THIS!

I recently wanted to know what it would take to run the Ampersand-cli demo app using ASP.NET MVC instead of node.js. So I did just that. The can be found on my github. Head over there and check it out. What follows is some the key points that is a bit different than the node.js version.

Getting Started

Node.js is required when setting up my demo code. It is not required but I used it because it is easier if you do. Node allows us to use npm and tools like gulp and browserify which we will cover in a bit.

First we need to install gulp and browserify from npm. Navigate to the WebApp root folder from the command line and run:

npm install -g gulp browserfiy

Next install all the dependencies found in the package.json from npm by running

npm install

Next run gulp.

gulp

Finally build and run the visual studio project.

Browserify and gulp

Ampersand highly suggests to use a common JS loader like browserify. In my example, I followed this suggestion. Browserify is a commonJS loader that allows you to require(”) modules, like node, in the browser. Gulp is a streaming build system that allows you to run jobs such as pre-compiling CSS, copying files, and many other things.

When browserify is pointed at our main app.js file (Scripts\App\app.js) and run, it will bundle all of the app’s JavaScript files into one file (Scripts\app.bundle.js).

Gulp and the corresponding gulpfile.js is used to watch the JavaScript files and automatically run browserify when things change. This means that as you edit files, gulp will rebuild the app.bundle.js file. All you have to do is reload the browser to get the final results.

Routes

With any native web application frame, the odds are good you are doing routing on the client side. Which means the server must serve the same html, css, and js for any page that is request. To do this, a catch all route is created.

Notice the _Layout.cs file is basically empty. This is because everything is loaded via Ampersand including anything in <head>. This also means that our default controller and action serve nothing. The only things our default action needs to serve is any CSS and JavaScript.

Templates

Ampersand’s demo site uses Jade templates and complies them at runtime down to a single template.js file. Meaning that all HTML is served to the user the first time the application loads. In my examples, I sort of replicated this by creating an Action that creates a single JS file with all the HTML templates. This can be better and more automated but for the purposes of this demo I stopped here to show a direction that could be taken.

See the Template Controller and the views in the Template view folder.

Templates do not need to be served this way. You could make HTTP get requests for them in Ampersand. I did it this way to keep in the spirit of the original demo.

Sample API

The simple API was created using Web API. Nothing really different going on here expect that because of C# our models are strongly typed.

CSS

The original Ampersand demo used stylizer and a CSS preprocessor. I took the output from that and put it into site.css. You could do whatever suits your needs here.

Final things to Note

In this code, the app.bundle.js and template JavaScript is not far future cached. It could be. That is something you will need to figure out. There are many different ways to do this in MVC, I did not want to suggest one. The same goes for the CSS.

Much like Nuget’s packages folder, the node_modules folder is not checked into source control. Running npm install command will repopulate this folder much like Nuget’s auto restore.

Other than what is about, the rest of the application is vanilla Ampersand, no other changes were made.

I am shy. I am very lucky that it is not crippling. But it is bad enough that it has and is keeping me from doing what I really want to be doing. For example It was keeping me from being active in the development community. I would like to be able to introduce my self to people I want to meet when I see them. Mainly I would like to stop being anxious when I meet new people.

It is weird because I have not been able to figure out if I am an introvert or extrovert. I have traits from both sides. I love talking in groups of people I know but also love the times I off doing things on my own. Communications is one of my top 5 strengths from Strengthsfinder. I don’t know if it is possible but I feel that I am both but on different days.

Now my shyness is really around people I don’t know or don’t know well. If I don’t know you, I am not comfortable around you. I can not just walk up and start a conversation. It causes me large amount anxiety. I would go to meetups and conferences and talk to no one while I was there. It bugged me a lot. That is until I decided enough was enough and that it was time to do something about it.

3 years ago, I attended the first That Conference. I love learning, it was inexpensive, and close by. I knew exactly 1 other person that was attending. I was excited. That was until morning of day 1.

Day 1 started with Clark Sell standing in front of the attendees and issuing a challenge. He stated that That Conference was designed to be a social conference. Yes the session are awesome but the organizers put ample time between sessions and had after hours events to foster socialization among the attendees. His challenge was to take these opportunities to meet new people.

Pretty much after that moment, I was freaked out. I was thinking I can’t do this. I am going to be that guy sitting in the corner by himself for 3 days. For the most part of day 1 that was true. Thankfully the 1 other person I knew is more outgoing than I am and found a group of people to hang out with on night 1. If it wasn’t for that 1 person, I would have been hiding in a corner for all 3 days.

To be clear, I love That Conference. I love, now, that it is setup to be social. And this challenge was exactly what I needed but I didn’t know it at the time.

After the conference was over, I was inspired to do awesome things. During the following months, I decided it was time to get over my shyness or at least deal with it. I didn’t really have a plan yet but I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be the person in the corner anymore. I started off by attending more meetups. At the very least I was getting more comfortable with being around people I didn’t know.

About a month before the 2nd That Conference, I got it in my head that was going to do an open spaces with the topic of developers with disabilities. I am dyslexic, this was my in. After the 3 days, I ended up chickening out. Fear sucks. The whole drive home, I regretted not doing it. The feeling sucked even more than the fear.

All was not lost, one amazing thing happened during the conference. During the time between the 1st and 2nd year, I became a bit more active on Twitter. While at That Conference, Clark Sell sort of called me out for not saying hi. I was hiding behind twitter and he basically said stop it. This sort of forced me into doing something I am not comfortable with. That was getting out of my chair and saying hi. I did it. It was a small victory. It was a step toward the realisation that getting over this is possible.

At this point it is August 2013 and it was time to get serious. I set 2 goal that I wanted to complete. Become active in development community and host an open spaces at That Conference 2014.

About this time, I learned that Milwaukee’s development community had an IRC channel (#devmke on freenode). I jumped in and idled. Even with just text between me and others I had anxiety about joining in the conversations. Over time, I learned who was who and started to join in. Slowly. Because of Twitter and IRC, I got to follow and interact a bit with people that organized some of the meetups in Milwaukee.

In early 2014, the organizers of MKEJS were talking in IRC about the need for a topic/speaker for that month. I suggested that they do a Node School workshop. I am not sure how but my suggestion turned into me facilitating the workshop. Node School workshops are a set of self guided lessons that use node to teach you node and other aspects of JavaScript. My job facilitator would be to get people started, show them how to use it, and help them if they get stuck. On top of this, this was looking to be the most popular MKEJS meetup yet.

Facilitating this workshop was an great step forward. They say facing your fears is a good way to get over them. Well public speaking to a group of people I don’t know. What could possibly go wrong? I faced them head on and everything went really well and gave me the confidence to do more. Shortly after, I was asked to help co-organize the MKEJS meetup which I accepted and at roughly the same time joined the Content Advisory Board for That Conference.

This August was the 3rd That Conference. So far I have reached one of my goals and have become more active in the development community. Now it was time to complete goal number 2 and do an open spaces. Before the conference, I told a few people my plan and asked them to help me make sure I do it. Since I didn’t went to let them or myself down I completed the goal. Here I am 3rd in line to tell my topic to roughly 1000 other developers, most I have never met. Yes I was nervous. Yes, stumbled a bit but I did it.

The conference went amazingly. I was able to meet many people I know from IRC and twitter in person for the first time. I was uneasy about approaching complete strangers but did so on a few occasions to recruit speakers for MKEJS.

Since That Conference this year, I had a new goal of giving a talk. This goal was completed in September when I gave a talk Titled “Rocking with Web Audio API” to MKEJS. The next goal is to give a talk at That Conference next year.

I am still a bit shy and still have problems approaching people but I am going to continue to work at it. It has been a slow process and I think it had to be for me. I had to be ready for the change to happen and that takes time.

As I was writing this, I realised that a lot of my anxiety stemmed from not having confidence in myself. The reason this took time is that I needed to build up my confidence before I could do the next thing. Now to work on that talk for That Conference 2015.

My first job out of college was working for a large printer of magazines. There was a good number of developers and for the first few years things were good. The company had some interesting abilities outside of print that I thought were really interesting and I stayed longer than I should have because the potential to get bigger was there.

Then 2008 happened. We all felt the crunch. Print is not really a growing industry and the recession did not help. Yet, I stayed. I stayed even after new projects required over time from day one. I stayed even though perks and benefits of working for this company disappeared because they needed to make the bottom line look better. I stayed for another 3 years. Why? Because I was chasing the what could be. The metaphoric carrot if you will. I believed the promises. I was a fool.

During those years, I was consistently underpaid when compared to market average. The work environment went from happy to hostal. Time lines went from reasonable to this needs to be done yesterday.

One day the carrot was removed. The CEO stood in front of the company and said they were going all in on print which mean the interesting abilities outside of print were being sidelined for projects that pushed print. I was done. I stopped working overtime. My work suffered. It didn’t take long before I left. I couldn’t chase a carrot I didn’t believe in.

This experience taught me a major lesson:

Stop chasing carrots

This is not an original idea. This is an idea that is supported by science and research. When a task requires even the slightest cognitive processing, carrots no longer work. In fact they tend to be more harmful than helpful. Dan Pink’s TED talk The Puzzle of Motivation sums this up very well.

In Dan’s talk he suggest that people who work in creative fields require different motivators. Motivators that you have right now, not that you may get at some point in the feature. Dan suggests 3 different items:

Autonomy – Can you do the work in a manner that works for you?

Mastery – Do you have a chance to learn and grow?

Purpose – Does the work affect the world in even the slightest bit?

There are many other factors but these 3 are important. Looking back on my relatively short career, I have to agree. My biggest issues were doing things I did not believe in and doing them in a way that didn’t work for me. Going back to my story above, I left that job because I no longer had a purpose I believed it. It made me sad that the focus of the company switched because those areas outside of print had purpose and were awesome.

Whatever you are doing are doing for a job, make sure you are getting something from it. If you are working 80 hours a week because you may get a raise, you are doing it wrong. It is very likely that you will not get anything and soon this type of effort will become expected from you. If you are working 80 hours a week because you love what you are doing and you are making that choice then I am not going to tell you not too.

HttpClient has become the standard way to make http requests in C#. This is mainly used for API calls but has other uses as well. Recently, I have had to make http requests to servers that require authentication and the documentation on how to do this is scattered. The funny part is that it is really easy to do.

can be basic, digest, ntlm, or negotiate. Then just updated the Network Credentials to that of the user you want to make the call and you are good to go.

It appears that kerberos on its own does not work. This may be because of my server configuration. However if you use negotiate, HttpClient will use kerberos if the server is configured for it otherwise it will fallback to NTLM.

Recently Jason Fried wrote an article titled “Is Your door Really Always Open?” In it, he suggests that having an open door policy is great but also a cop-out. And I agree with him. So much so that I would like to go a little deeper as to why this is a problem.

I am an introvert and a bit shy. because of those traits, it is going to take a lot for me to go into my bosses office and talk. I am not going to do this unless I absolutely have to or I know it is likely that my point will be made. Recently I came across some videos called “The Power of Introverts” that suggests that this is a trait of introverts as a whole. They tend to be more calculated when they speak up and wont do so unless they know they will be heard.

What this means to a manager is that having an open door isn’t enough. It means that many of the employees a managers has are not just going randomly walk into your office and talk.

The other problem that I have seen with open door policies is that employees only use them to bring up problems or things they want to change.

Why don't you get open honest feedback from your people? Because when you didn't like it, you accused them of "not being a team player".

If an employee is to honest to often they get labeled. Labels are bad. It is hard to remove labels. Labels keep employee opening up because they don’t want the label.

As an employee, these are the main two things that keep me from bursting into my bosses office and being honest. As an employee, the easiest way to fix these problems is to do what Jason Fried suggested in his article. That is, as a manager/boss, you need to be the one to open the communication. You need to go out and actively communicate with your employees. Once they get comfortable, they will be honest and more willing to come to you about anything. This has the added bonus of hearing more than just the negative things going on in the office.

I had a problem. I was tasked to make a wizard type interface for a few workflows in an web app. The workflows had 3+ steps with the current max number of steps at 10.

Options

Option 1: I could control state on the server. After every step in the workflow the data of that step would be posted to the server where the server would keep track of it in session and take the user to the next step. This is very doable, and is pretty much how web apps have functioned before ajax. The downside to this is controlling partial state on the server is hard because session management is hard. You have to account weird scenarios like what happens if the user starts the same workflow in a different browser window, you now have to somehow identify what window goes to what session. Or how do you know when to clear a workflow in progress because the user navigated to a different page in the web app. What happens if they come back? All of these question can be fixed in some form but normally involve a lot of if statements.

Option 2: Wouldn’t it be easier to keep all workflow data on the client until the workflow was completed? Yes, yes it is. However this means that the client can no longer do full page reloads between steps. No problem, there are frameworks that cover this such as Angular.js. In my solution, I am loading and unloading html templates into the DOM manually and using Knockout.js for data binding. Why did I roll my own this way? Because IE8 but that is a different blog post. By keeping all the workflow state in the browser, we have less issues to deal with but a few new ones come up. For example, do you care that the user has to start over if they hit refresh? Do you need the browsers back button to work? These were easy for my use cases, it didn’t matter at the moment because of how this will be used in production. I started down this road, things were going well. But then I noticed that my JavaScript was getting kind of cluttered with if statements such as…

if (here) do this
else if (over there) do that
else if (holy crap) I have no idea
else if (another one?) and I am lost

Option 2b: State machines! About 2 steps into the first workflow, I noticed a pattern. Every step in a workflow loaded something, waited for the user to do work, moved to the next step. The lightbulb went off and I started looking at state machines in JavaScript. I found many like machina.js and npm had many in there as well. machina.js being the first in my search results, I went with it. It looks good and probably would have solved my problem but it has(had?) a dependency on underscore.js Due to the nature of this project, introducing an external library is time consuming, introducing two is a huge pain. But, you guessed it, that is another post someday. In the end, I decided to build my own. Why? Because it sounded fun, also I didn’t need a full featured library, yet.

Code!

So I wrote a state machine. It had a few requirements there were identified upfront.

Know what was the current state

Be able to change to a new state

Call an unload method on the old state

Call a load method on the new state

Pass data to the new state

Be able to generically call methods on the current state

Over time, I am sure the requirements will grow and we will make the choice of growing this code base or moving to a more feature complete option. And here it is.

As you can see, the state machine takes in an object that is the different states that it can be. A usage example is below.

The changeStateTo function will call unload on the current state, and then call load on the new state. It has some light error checking to make sure states and methods exist before continuing.

The callAction method is a generic way to call a specific action (function) on the current state. An example of this would be if there is a button that is on every screen, you could use this method to call that action when it is pressed on the current state.

Recently, I had a need to create a web application that functioned kind of like a native app. The design requirements were simple. There would be a header and menu stuck to the top of the page and a footer and navigation buttons stuck to the bottom of the page. Content would fill the middle.

There are many ways to do this. For example, bootstrap has an example of how to do this type of layout. This is probably the most common example of how to keep elements stuck to the bottom of the page. It has one problem, the height of the stuck element must be known. Sadly the height for me is not always the same which makes this example not ideal.

Flexbox is another option. It would work good except for its browser support. For this project I had the fun requirement of needing to support IE8. Don’t ask, long story, some day I will tell it.

So how did I solve my problem? CSS Table Display! CSS Tables allow you to use semantically correct layout with divs (or newer tags) but have those divs act as if they were table elements. So one can read all about that what they are and how to use them all over the Googles. The remainder of this post is what I did with them.

Below is some example html and css I used. Header, menu, content, footer, and bottom stuff are all normal display block div tags. They work like you would expect. It even works will to drop in Bootstrap grid system to place things on different places horizontally.

The key to the is the div with class .trow-fill. It will push all elements below it to the bottom of the page because its display is set to table-row. Make sure to notice that the body tag is set to display as a table. What is cool about this is the content or the navigation area can change heights and everything will move correctly. The stuff that should be at the bottom of the page will stay there.

Now a few things may be running through your head. Mainly something about tables and it feeling dirty. Well I was with you up until I noticed something about Bootstrap. In v2.X of bootstrap, CSS tables is exactly how it achieves the fluid grid system. Just look right here. If it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me.

I am reviewing two books: Rework and Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals fame. Both books are laid out in the same form. They have multiple sections and each section has multiple chapters. Chapters are short: 1-3 pages normally. These short chapters are great because they are packed full of info without being overly long and boring. The minor down side is some chapters left me wanting more on the subject. Each chapter has an illustration that goes with it. Some of these are hilarious. I had no problems finishing these books and staying engaged while reading them.

Both books are not made up theory that sounds nice either. Both books are rooted in what makes 37Signals work. The ideas and concepts in the books come straight from day to day life at 37Signals.

Rework

Rework’s tagline is “Change the way you work forever”. The general idea is to challenge the status quo of what work should be and look like. It pushes the standard norms of running a business. For example the chapter “Why Grow?” discusses the idea of the right sized business. It suggests to the reader to find the right size for them and to stay there. This is different then the status quo of: If you are not growing you’re dying.

Remote

Remote’s tagline is “Office not Required”. It could be considered a playbook for setting up and having remote employees. I would suggest this for both employees or employers that want or even are working remotely. The great part about this book is it makes it clear what the trade offs are between working remotely vs being in office. In many cases it suggests why these trade offs are invalid or how to deal with them. The chapter “The Lone Outpost” suggest that giving one employee the ability to work remote is setting up remote to fail. It states that remote will only work if multiple people feel change that is needed to make remote work.

Conclusion

I have seen my fair share of “old way” thinking while working traditional and nontraditional jobs. It pains me to see this “old way” still strong in management today. Both of these books push the idea that there is a better way. It is a new and different way, there are pitfalls, but in the end you will be happier, your employees will be happier, and your product will be better. I highly recommend these books to pretty much anyone, exceptionally if you are working in a creative job such as development or design.

On my way home from work the other day, I was listening to .NET Rocks Episode 934 with Uncle Bob on building software. Carl,Richard, and Uncle Bob had a discussion on HealthCare.gov and the issues with the site from a development stand point. At 28 mins 45 seconds in , Richard states “I am responsible to my industry first and my customers second” and this struck me as very profound.

I have never considered idea before that my actions, code, and software is a representation of my industry. That because of my actions as a developer could causes a person to view all programmers in a different way.

If we look at lawyers for example, we can see the stigma of the job. Society seems to have negative view of lawyers. That somehow you are a terrible person if you go into law. Why is this? There are terrific people that work in law. I have met them and worked with them. The negative view was probably built by the few that have acted unprofessional. The ambulance chasers and those who make frivolous lawsuit just to make a buck. My point, is that it won’t take much for our profession, software development, to get a similar stigma if projects keep failing.

I fear that the stigma of a software developer not being professional, not caring is already taking hold. The software the world uses every day is pretty terrible. Why is my password limited to 12 characters for my online credit card account. Why does the family doctor tell me all the issues he has with the EMR instead of telling me how awesome it is? Why does my cable box freeze so much? Why does Google Chrome’s spell check not fix the fucking word when I click on it? People should be excited about how software is making their lives easier not about how much it sucks. Our jobs as developers is to provide software that helps people not infuriates them.

Uncle Bob and many others created the Software Craftsmanship manifesto in 2009. The goal of this movement is to push craftsmanship and professionalism in the industry. The general idea is to promote doing what is right over getting it done. Good enough is no longer acceptable.

Not only working software, but also well-crafted software
Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value
Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships

I have signed the manifesto as a reminder to push my industry forward. To not sit idly by. To make awesome!